Farewell,
Bromley Cranston.
Needless to say, I hurried to Eastport. But my trip was unnecessary. I found Harold Marsden in a “private sanitarium” for the hopelessly insane. There all day, and as far into the night as the opiates would permit him, he is to be found seated before a radio set, the earphones clamped to his head—listening. His statements, methodically filed away by the head of the place, corresponded wildly with the prophecies of my strange letter. Now he was listening to fragmentary messages from those two he had seen precipitated into space, he maintained. Listening.
And they had disappeared, utterly. I found the large seal ring in the inkwell on the desk. Also the slip in the hatband of the hat which had been placed in the wall safe, unlocked. The postmaster remembered the seals on the letter my cousin had mailed, and the approximate time he had received it. I felt my own reason wavering.
That is why, fantastic as is the whole affair, I cannot yet bear the sound of one of those radio loud speakers. It is when that inarticulate sound they call “static” occurs, when fragments of words and sentences seem to be painfully attempting to pierce a hostile medium,—that I picture that hunched up figure with its spidery earphones,—listening. Listening. For what?
The End
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 1927 issue of Amazing Stories Magazine.